Muckraker Upton Sinclair--beyond `The Jungle'

July 02, 2006|By Eric Arnesen, a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Fulbright chair in American studies at Uppsala University in Sweden

Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair

By Anthony Arthur

Random House, 380 pages, $27.95

Over the course of his 91 years, Upton Sinclair became one of America's most prolific and politically committed novelists. Today only one of his dozens of books, "The Jungle," is still widely read. That novel is usually encountered in high school or college history courses, included on syllabuses for its depiction of immigrant workers and harsh factory conditions rather than its literary merits. Even his 1943 Pulitzer-Prize winning "Dragon's Teeth," the fourth of his sweeping and engaging 11-novel Lanny Budd/World's End series that deals with the rise of Nazism, remains largely forgotten. Despite his impressive output, Sinclair has "virtually disappeared from American literary anthologies," says author Anthony Arthur, and most of his books are out of print.

Arthur's "Radical Innocent" makes the case for Sinclair's importance as a writer and social commentator while sharing critics' views of his literary skills. Sinclair was indeed "energetic, principled, and humane--and seriously flawed," Arthur concurs. He "wrote too much, and often with insufficient care, for an audience that was more interested in his message than his art." Yet Sinclair was a central figure in 20th Century American cultural and literary life, a man who knew almost "everyone of importance in the intellectual and political circles of Europe and America for half a century." If nothing else, Sinclair's life serves as a window on the political and cultural currents flowing through those years.

But "Radical Innocent" is less a life-and-times book than it is a kind of celebrity biography. Arthur, a former literature professor at California State University at Northridge, is more interested in exploring Sinclair's interpersonal relationships and the sheer drama of his life. As he reveals in copious detail, Sinclair's life had more than its share of drama. Extensive archival and other sources allow Arthur to reconstruct in intimate detail Sinclair's idiosyncratic personality, relationships, professional successes and failures, and relentless professional drive. On that front, Arthur has produced a highly readable study that is difficult to put down.

Although his early years as a writer were spent largely in obscurity, the young Sinclair was convinced that he would become an "artist of the first rank." Subordinating his personal life to the pursuit of his literary destiny, Sinclair treated his first wife, Meta Fuller Sinclair, and new son, David, less as sources of familial joy than as obstacles to his success.

While struggling to persuade the publishing giants to invest in his future at the turn of the 20th Century, Sinclair encountered the American socialist movement, which gave his life and writing "the focus they had lacked until this point." For the young and still unknown writer, socialism was largely a moral creed aimed at rectifying the evils of widespread poverty and the degradation of labor he witnessed around him. Well into the 1930s, his passionate critique of economic inequality, class warfare that pitted the rich against the poor, and class-based justice that targeted radicals and labor activists for harsh repression filled up thousands of his pages.

Sinclair finally found the fame he desperately sought in 1906 with the publication of "The Jungle." He had been determined to write " `the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Labor Movement' " (as one account has it) to fuel the socialist insurgency against "wage slavery" just as the original contributed to the abolitionist movement. Arriving in Chicago, he immersed himself in the stockyards and their environs, met immigrants and reformers, and interviewed foremen, politicians and workers.

"Gifted with an amoeba-like quality of absorbing sights and sounds and information, and driven by a messianic sense of purpose, he had nearly enough material within a few short weeks to write his novel," Arthur notes. Initially serialized in the socialist weekly Appeal to Reason, "The Jungle" ultimately catapulted Sinclair into the big time when editors from Doubleday gambled on the book's success.

Their instincts proved on target, as Sinclair's expose of stockyard working conditions became a best seller. But if Sinclair's purpose had been to cast light upon the squalid and unconscionably bad conditions endured by immigrant workers, what Americans instead recoiled at were his accounts of unsanitary killing floors and rancid meat. Part of a wave of hard-hitting muckracking investigations of corruption in American politics and business during the Progressive era, the book captured even President Theodore Roosevelt's attention (if not appreciation, for Roosevelt came to hold Sinclair in contempt) and generated popular support for modest if important national legislation establishing health and inspection standards for the meat industry.